Ashley McBryde’s breakthrough hit, 2017’s “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega,” established the artist not only an astute vocalist but as a nuanced wordsmith. Follow-up hits such as 2019’s autobiographical “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” the irreverent “One Night Standards” and her heart wrenching collaboration with Carly Pearce, “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” (which earned McBryde her first Billboard Country Airplay No. 1 as well as five CMA Awards nods) only cemented her as a star.
Come Friday (Sept. 30), her collaborative concept album Lindeville will help to maintain that status. Showcasing her penchant for tightly-curated character studies, the project takes various characters from the same fictional town and explores what happens when their stories intertwine.
“The expected thing, especially coming off having a No. 1 with Carly, is to shoot straight down the middle,” says McBryde, seated in her manager’s Nashville office outfitted with stained glass windows and slightly gothic, antique knickknacks. “I think that’s the perfect reason not to do that. When you do a love project like this, it’s supposed to be like, album five or six, or 10, which is another reason to do it now. Because f—k ‘should,’ right?”
The town’s name of Lindeville nods to songwriter Dennis Linde, who wrote Elvis’ “Burnin’ Love,” and “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” which had originally been recorded by the Oak Ridge Boys and New Grass Revival before becoming a smash hit for Garth Brooks in 1994. In his other work, Linde had a habit of featuring a character named Earl, who shows up in the Sammy Kershaw hit “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer” and meets his demise in the Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl.” Linde also designed a map that designated a fictional town where the characters in his songs lived — right down to the water tower referenced in the Linde-written Joe Diffie hit “John Deere Green.”
“I didn’t know what else we would name it,” McBryde says of her upcoming album’s title. “I had been here in Nashville for several years before I found out the same guy had written all those songs. It’s kind of the opposite of what we did — we realized we had the characters and then developed the town for them. But we wanted to make sure we paid tribute, and we thought we should name the town after him.”
McBryde gathered a group of close friends and frequent co-writers — Aaron Raitiere, Connie Harrington, Brandy Clark and Nicolette Hayford — to help bring her characters to life. And, as she’s done before on previous writer retreats, she asked Hayford bring a writer she had never met. For these sessions, Benjy Davis rounded out the group. “I love that wild card aspect,” says McBryde. “There’s no telling what that other ingredient is going to change.” (Of Davis, she says: “He’s brilliant, I love his voice, his presence, he’s a pleasure to write with, and he always has cigarettes.”)
Once assembled they all gathered at a lake house about an hour outside of Nashville for a week-long writing retreat, leaving with songs that reverberate with unvarnished truths. “We had no thought of, ‘Should this a ballad?’ or ‘We need to write a song about this [topic].’ Our goal was just to be happy … Somebody might be high, somebody might be a bit drunk or just had a mimosa. If it’s lunch, someone’s making sandwiches while we’re writing or you’re eating on top of your sketch pad. We were having so much fun we didn’t want to stop.”
She says they wrote nearly 18 hours a day, all gathered around the kitchen table that served as a central command station, covered with iPads, computers and various writing pads. “We hunkered down like a family surrounding a big puzzle — only all the pieces were invisible,” says McBryde.
Even the smoke breaks on the front porch manifested in three old-school, between-song “jingles” touting local Lindeville favorites like homemade pie at the Dandelion Diner and the clandestine “We don’t ask, We don’t tell/ We just buy, we just sell” policy at Ronnie’s Pawn Shop.
While the songs do center on life in a small town, the stories and characters in Lindeville dispel the idyllic nostalgia that permeates many songs currently staking their claims on the country charts. Over the course of 13 songs, McBryde and company unfurl a cast of denizens in the fictional Lindeville, including bartender Lonnie, burger flipper and meth addict Leroy, drug dealer and pill addict Patti, and several other women — Betty, Brenda, Jenny and Lynette — each with their own way of coping with life.
“Play Ball,” with lead vocals from Brothers Osborne’s TJ Osborne, offers the tale of Pete, a kind-hearted man who “chalks the ballfields at Dennis Linde park…he lost his wife to cancer and a thumb in Vietnam.” Even the dogs of Lindeville get their own moment, as the wry wit of “If These Dogs Could Talk” highlights vocals from Clark.
“We do tend to pave dirt roads a little bit. I love what we do here in Nashville, the way we are able to time capsule small towns and make sure everybody can feel how important that is to our upbringing,” McBryde says. “But sometimes, somebody’s getting their a– beat at the supermarket, and everybody knows about it. It’s okay to acknowledge it, at least wink at it.”
The album — recorded at the SmoakStack Studios and produced by Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne — features a rotating cast of singers, including Clark, Pillbox Patti, Caylee Hammack, Brothers Osborne and Raitiere, with McBryde’s lead and/or harmony vocals on about half of the project’s 13 songs and jingles. A few tracks, including “Bonfire at Tina’s” and the well-chosen cover of Linda Ronstadt’s “When Will I Be Loved” feature lush, rowdy harmonies from McBryde, Hammack, Hayford (Pillbox Patti) and more. “We could have cut it with just me singing it and it would be me telling all these stories,” says McBryde, “but it’s so much easier to listen to when there are different points of view. “
“Gospel Night in the Strip Club” serves as one of the project’s most gripping, soul-searching pulses, depicting a bartender who offers late-night sojourners a place at the bar to pour out their pain, a place as good as any church pew. He “does the last call benediction then wipes the bar slate clean,” before the song reaches its soaring, pointed chorus of “Hallelujah/ Jesus loves the drunkards and the whores and the queers…would you recognize him if he bought you a beer?”
“I was like, ‘We’re gonna get in so much trouble for this,’ but I don’t care. Because it’s true,” McBryde says.
There’s “Bonfire at Tina’s,” which begins as a near-cat fight but ends as an anthem of (brief) unity, for which McBryde recently filmed the video. “I don’t think we’ve been able to harness that idea previously that we don’t like each other a lot in small towns,” McBryde says. “But when one of you is down, everybody bands together. All kinds of things women go through — getting cheated on, or your stepkids hate you — those things are very real that we need to burn things about and drink about. Then on Monday, it’s back to talking s–t, no problem.”
The album’s denouement, and title track, ties together the preceding stories into a moment of peaceful clarity. The song also foreshadows new music, with a line about Betty in “Lindeville” nodding to “Blackout Betty,” to be included on another forthcoming McBryde album.
“We do spend a little while going, ‘Patti takes too many pills, Betty drinks too much, Leroy is a meth head,’” McBryde says. “But then we have a moment where Patti sleeps fine, and Leroy adopts a dog who kept showing up at the diner looking for scraps. On that night, things are peaceful and pretty, because it’s important to recognize when sh-t’s okay for a minute.”
Now, looking around the room she’s currently in, McBryde recalls gathering the team that put Lindeville together in that same space less than a month ago to celebrate what they had made. “We had charcuterie and cocktails and listened to it. I wanted us to experience it together at the same time, and not just through a link on your phone. When we write stuff, sometimes you can tell that it’s an idea that came to visit and let you be its mouthpiece for a minute. This felt important to hear together, the magic we created.”
